Last year Google started to play around with adding profiles to the Chrome browser, and I feel like its usefulness is often overlooked. Most people attribute having multiple user profiles with being able to share a computer between multiple family members. You may not think about how useful it could be to have multiple profiles for yourself.

Personally I rely on Google Chrome’s multiple profiles each and every day. I generally keep multiple user profiles to help separate my work and personal stuff on some of my machines. Each Google Chrome profile can run simultaneously, and each one will have its own icon on the Windows Taskbar. The Taskbar icon will place the profile’s avatar in the bottom-right corner of the Chrome icon so that you can distinguish between them.

The other thing I like about creating multiple profiles is that each one can get tied to its own Google account for syncing. I have one Google account for personal, and another for work. All my bookmarks and extensions are synced across machines, which helps provide some independence from the machine you need to use. It’s really nice having full access to both my personal and work-related bookmarks available on the same machine while still keeping them separated.

So how do you set up new users/profiles in Chrome? Just click on the wrench icon and pull up the Settings. When you scroll down a little bit you should see a Users section toward the bottom. Click the Add new user button and a new Chrome window should immediately pop up. You are now running two Chrome profiles simultaneously. You can always use a single window and switch between profiles by clicking on the profile’s icon located in the upper-left corner of the Chrome window. When you click on the icon it will list out all of the available accounts on the machine.

That’s all there is to it. Now with this little trick you can easily separate out your personal and work stuff while still retaining quick access to data from both on the same machine.